News Archive: Max February 2005

About nine months ago I switched from
Microsoft Windows
to
Gentoo Linux.
I wasn’t unhappy with Windows, but Linux is very handy
when you’re
designing a web site,
and I got sick of rebooting all the time to switch from one to the other.
So I decided to suck it up and go all the way.

This turned out to be a lot like moving to another country, both in the
sense that I didn’t know where anything was or understand the local
language, and because I realized things about the
place I’d left. So here’s what I learned.

(Note: There are several different types of Linux, and
they each do some things better than the others. Not all my comments
apply to all Linux distributions. But I’m still going to just
say “Linux.”)

Linux is a religion.
When you first hear about Linux, it’s from slightly creepy people
whose eyes shine with a born-again fervor while they rattle on about
all kinds of things you don’t understand. I have become one of those
people. There really needs to be some kind of warning sticker on the
CD: “May cause you to blog about the philosophies of operating systems.”
I mention this up front because it helps to explain everything else.

Windows thinks you’re an idiot;
Linux thinks you’re a genius.
What I love about Windows is that no matter what it asks you to do,
you can choose the default and it works. You can
actually install software by inserting the CD, closing your eyes, and
hitting ENTER over and over again. You have no idea what you’re doing,
but you don’t care.

Linux, on the other hand, wouldn’t dare to assume it knows what
you want. There’s hardly a default setting on anything, anywhere.
Naturally you will want to do some in-depth reading
about horizontal frequency rates before leaping into anything as advanced
as displaying a picture on the screen, right? The first time you do
anything in Linux, you come away with an education.

Each approach is handy at different times. It’s very handy being
treated as an idiot, until you want to do something smart. Then it’s
annoying.

Windows plays soccer; Linux plays rugby.
In soccer
(sorry, to me
this
is football), whenever
one player makes the slightest contact with another, he collapses to
ground, writhing in agony and clutching at his ankle. Everyone
gathers around and looks very worried until the referee holds up
a yellow card and then—amazing!—the player springs up again,
completely cured. So too Windows: as soon as anything
goes wrong with any program, the whole thing collapses in a
screaming heap, and requires a reboot. Linux, on the other
hand, shrugs off application failures like a rugby player
ignores broken fingers. Programs crash, but Linux keeps
going.

Linux marketing sucks.
Microsoft is a corporation with an overriding
financial interest in persuading people to buy Windows. The people
who make Linux, on the other hand, are mostly volunteers who simply
love building good code. So while there are plenty of Microsoft
advertisements and salespeople and lobbyists to tell the government
that you can’t trust Linux, there is practically nobody on the other side.
It’s always a bit creepy when you have
a big corporation up against a non-profit or non-entity; you end
up being told that sugared drinks are better for you than water,
you wouldn’t dare breast-feed your baby when good old manufactured
formula is available, and there’s no such thing as global warming.
Linux people don’t merely lack the funding
to match Microsoft’s marketing; they also don’t really want to.
The Linux
attitude is that they have built a magnificent operating system
and if you can’t see that, well, that’s your problem.
So Microsoft’s aim is to sell operating systems while Linux people
focus on building them.

Windows lets you, Linux unleashes you.
Occasionally I see the phrase “lets you” in discussions of Windows
software—as in, “This software lets you press C to get a preview.”
The idea that you are not allowed to do anything
to your computer unless it “lets you” is, I realized, very
Microsoftian. Because in Linux, you can do whatever the hell you want to
pretty much any piece of code: improve it, change it, or break it.
Not that you need to, because everything is incredibly customizable
already, but you can. If you complain about any piece of software
in Linux, you stand a good chance of being told, “Well go make
it better, then.” By comparison, Microsoft asks,
“Where do you want to go today?” but then strongly recommends
you select: “Default.”

Windows gets in your face.
Like an annoying four-year-old, Windows
can’t go two minutes without attention. You boot, start
to do something, and suddenly there windows are flying at your face.
Everything is checking for updates or activating or deactivating
or switching channels and IT HAS TO TELL YOU THIS RIGHT NOW.
Linux puts its messages in the log, and you read
them when and if you feel like it.

Windows fails silently.
Oh my God. Before, I never even noticed this.
But now every time I have to use Windows I end up bug-eyed and yelling
at the screen, “Just tell me what’s wrong!” When something
goes wrong in Linux, it spews messages into the system log,
which you can read through to see what it was doing. Then you copy a
phrase or two into Google, click Search, and choose from a list of
pages competing to tell you exactly what the problem is and how to fix it.

Windows doesn’t do this. Windows doesn’t even have a system log, as far
as I know. When things go wrong, they do so mysteriously and
without complaint: you click buttons and nothing happens, or you try to
run a program and it just vanishes. There’s no way to discover what
the actual problem is. If you Google for the symptoms, you find endless pages
complaining about the same thing, but no solutions. Or
you do find solutions, but they all come down to the same thing:
(1) Reboot (2) Reinstall. They should issue a Microsoft
Support Manual that contains nothing except these two words,
because that’s the solution to every single Windows problem. Even if
you manage to fix it, you never find out what exactly the problem is; you
just grope around blindly reinstalling things until suddenly and
just as mysteriously things start working again. The other
day I e-mailed a company’s tech support and their semi-automated advice
was to reinstall their program and Windows XP. If that didn’t
work, I was to e-mail again to get help from a human.
That’s right, wiping my hard drive was the first step in their diagnoses
process. This is like having to get a heart transplant before the doctor will
see you about your hiccups.

The end result is that even though Windows is simpler to get to grips
with, I never felt really confident with it, because I couldn’t
tell what it’s doing. Linux requires more understanding, but when
you’ve got that, you’re more assured.

Linux people rock.
One day my Windows PC choked on an automatic security
update, and thereafter every time it tried to update itself, it
failed. Having an unpatched Windows computer connected to the internet
is like walking through a bad neighborhood tossing your BMW
car keys from hand to hand, so I wanted to do something about this.
There was no error message, of course, aside from the gloriously
unhelpful, “The update failed to install.”
I ended up going through the maze of Microsoft’s
technical support to send in a problem report.
I received an automated e-mail back saying my report had
been received, then nothing. Weeks went by. I tried again. Same thing.
Then one day, it just started working again.

Of course, this is not specific to Microsoft. Pretty much every
company treats a support customer like something they just stepped in:
their aim is to get rid of you with as little touching as possible. I can’t
remember the last time I e-mailed a company for support and it
didn’t go like this:

Receive automated response suggesting I look in FAQs

Receive response from alleged human being that
consists of copy-and-pasted text from FAQ

I write back thanking them for the information and expressing regret
that none of it is remotely relevant to the problem I described

Human being actually reads my e-mail starts being helpful.

By which time I figure out the problem myself.

The other day I had some trouble getting a piece of hardware working
on my Linux machine, and found a web site by
a guy who had written
Linux drivers for it. Not because it was his job;
he just felt like it. The hardware was Australian-specific and Google
wasn’t helping much, so I e-mailed him a question, not really
expecting a reply—because it’s a bit like e-mailing Bill Gates to
ask what that DOS command is that displays all the directories.
(Or would be if Gates actually wrote DOS. Bada boom! Sorry. I’m sorry.
See point #1.) He wrote right back with the answer.

This is the bit when I look back at—ah, forget it, I can’t hand-hold
you new people forever.

No sooner had I posted
the blog
about getting the Syrup
screenwriting gig when I received an e-mail back. “Ah!” I thought.
“Already the congratulations are rolling in!” This is what it said:

you only write about your scripts, and that too few and far between.
youre ignoring your loyal website readers such as me.
you stopped writing funny stuff long ago. im upset. :(

you need to get back to the old days when you wrote a post every other
day, and incredibly funny ones too.

regards
arjun

This evoked several competing thoughts. First was, “Kiss my
butt, Arjun!” Second was, “Maybe he’s got a point. I haven’t
done so many comedy blogs lately. And he is quite flattering
about my older stuff.” The third was, “Kiss my butt, Arjun!
What do you want, a refund?”

I know artists have to put up with people saying,
“I like your old albums/books/films better than your new ones,”
but geez, I didn’t think I’d get that about my web site.
I searched through my e-mail and discovered that Arjun had written
to me a couple of times before.
If I were petty enough, I might observe that his earlier e-mails
were much more entertaining than this one. And I am, so I have.

I finally changed
my e-mail page
to announce that I can no longer reply to all letters. I cringed as I did
it, because I knew some people would take this as proof that I am
an out-of-touch egomaniac with no time for his fans, and I’d prefer
to keep that a secret.
I also worried I would get fewer e-mails, since people might not
bother writing if there wasn’t much chance of a reply.
Instead, my e-mail inflow practically doubled. It’s like everyone
was looking at that pathetic line, “I will try to reply in 19 weeks,”
and thought, “Poor bastard, I’ll leave him be.”

Or maybe it was because of my
interview with Ellis. This
blog clearly encouraged a lot of people to e-mail me crazy comments
in the hope that I would interview them for the site, too. Either that
or a lot of genuinely crazy people suddenly all wrote to me at once.
Hmm. That’s a more disturbing idea. But anyway, Ellis has his own
web site
now, which promises to reveal more of the enigma wrapped inside a
riddle that is Ellis. Compulsory reading.

In December I added the ability for site members to post comments in
response to my blogs, which, to my surprise, turned out great.
If I post a funny blog, people post a bunch of funny follow-ups; if I
post a serious blog, people post lots of thought-provoking comments.
I have to admit, the reason it took me so long to add this was
because I was sure it would get spammed into the ground by idiots.
And I guess this will happen sooner or later, since this is
the internet. But so far, so good!

I received many long, thoughtful e-mails in reply to my
“On Capitalism and Corporatism”
blog. I took the time to read them and mull them over and think
how lucky it was I didn’t have to write equally thoughtful replies.
Amongst them was a one-sentence letter that,
possibly inadvertently, made the most persuasive argument for
the ascendancy of capitalism of all. After digesting my opinions
on political economics, globalization, and corporatism, Joseph
had this to say: